![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
Ordinarily I’d save this for the recently established tradition of Weekend Updates, but this is just too good to make you wait for.
Rejecter, literary agent’s assistant, slushpile marauder and 101 Reasons interviewee, told an aspiring POD author to stop writing.
Not “slow down”, not “revise and resubmit”, not “not for us”. Stop writing.
‘Twas a beautiful thing, to see those words together on the blog of a publishing professional.
Hopefully this is not an anomaly, not simply the frayed nerves of someone pushed a POD too far. I see this as a new backlash, a trend towards blunt honesty, the emergence of the Stop Writing movement.
(The admonition came as a result of a POD author appearing in the comments of another post, exhorting that traditional publishing was an “old nag” and that in the new world order, “there’s going to be no pre-press filters, only post-publishing, so get used to it”, and then posted a link to his PDF, which in this case stand for “Pile of Dog Faeces”. Rejecter, and many other commenters, examined the finished product minutely, and pronounced it shit. Not shitty, but just plain shit, incomprehensibly awful navel-gazing prose poetry. Said author proceeded to chew through seventeen flavours of huffy, while comparing himself to Joyce, TS Eliot and e.e. cummings. Sound familiar?)
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Just for the record.
I have not now nor ever compared my self to Joyce, TS Eliot and e.e. cummings.
If you read the comments there carefully you’ll noticed that was the commenter Steene .
Retract immediately.
(Now that’s huffy.)
The last story in .before Country will probably be a better place for you to begin. It explains the shitty stuff.
Meika, you know damn well that you made the comparison to TS Eliot first. And you certainly didn’t refute the comparison to Joyce.
I’ll retract the e.e. cummings reference if and when you retract your book and edit the fucker.
I can hardly believe that you think I should read the last story first, to “explain the shitty stuff”.
If you know your work is “shitty” and “awkward” in places, and so badly arranged that you have to tell people to read out of sequence, edit it. Edit edit edit rewrite and edit. If you’re not prepared to do that before dropping it on the world, please just stop writing. Anywhere.
I did not say I wrote like TS Eliot, I wanted to emulate his audience building program. (However mistakenly I am on this meme).
There were lots of comments way off the mark that I did not refute by the way(like the ESL comments). They were just so way off beam and said more about the commenter than me.
Also, I have tried to stay on topic and explain the new methods more fully (ebooks and POD) and so tried to only reply (over at the rejector) where I could link back to that theme.
Few have responded to me on that level. (Go on try. I dare you all.)
The suggestion to read the last tell first was more to show that i did know the rules, and that I return there. It is also way more accessible and explains the convoluted, dense, precious why of the prose poems.
However structure comes from Shakespeare, see quote to second story Exit Cave.
I would prefer everyone to start at the beginning.
(And no I am not Shakespeare but you can believe that I do think that if it makes it easier for you.)(I wonder what happens if I, or anyone, mentions ‘Jesus’ here, or Lennon for that matter).
And no I don’t think you’re dumb, and, furthermore, I refute any suggestion that my aunt is in fact a large white whale.
RE: edit, edit edit
If anything the older tells are over edited (over 20 years) and require a fresh eye.
I am not using the old style methods for writing/editing/publishing, now don’t get me wrong, Doric Columns are beautiful and as an interpretation of upended tree trunks can be quite a good solution when building impressive homesteads in a slave economy, but the real and neat architectural solution is is not the capital and the column, but the keystone and the arch.
There are new technologies around, and at first we will use them as we did the old, but as we experiment with them we will come to understand their true worth and our design methods will change
google dotcom was a beta for years, now look at it (we are using its resources right here).
Now, regardless of my response to you here, to your suggestions, the 1.0 release of .before Country in February next year will be the better for it, this preview copy is not the final release, think of it as a galley proof with a very wide, critical and professional, if not all-knowing team.
The world.
my trackback
Meika-
If you love words so much, why do keep hurting them?
Your stuff is dreadful, pretentious, and your attitude reeks of contempt for …well, everyone except your self.
Please stop writing.
Meika, “comparison” also means other things than “I am just like”. You’re taking a leaf from the books of better writers, chopping them up and glueing the pieces down where they land.
Web 2.0 will not make a shitty book shine. Self-publishing POD is not a new idea, and it doesn’t change the order of the words.
The Internet is not a critique group. The people telling you your book sucks are your potential customers. And you’re insulting them by releasing work when you know it’s not finished.
Everything else you say, every other intention is meaningless if you’re too lazy to do your best.
The Internet is not a critique group. The people telling you your book sucks are your potential customers. And you’re insulting them by releasing work when you know it’s not finished.
That’s the old world. That the beautiful Doric Column afficionado reaction when they see their first arch. “You call that a column!! HA.”
See Person of the Year: You
No doubt the oldies make up a lot of the market still, if they are insulted I suggest they seek help.
Meika,
You are a twit. You’re not even clever or talented enough to be an idiot. You’re a self-involved, talentless, half-baked halfwit.
Millions of sperm in every orgasm, and you get through. Good God, man, the fact that self-righteous morons like you can label themselves a writer just because you (barely) manage to put one word after the other is an insult so dire to every one of us who works and yearns and begs to create something that may one day be considered art that I can’t help but hate every anencephalic, navel-gazing puff of air that escapes your smug lips.
Breathing or writing. I don’t care which, but stop one.
That’s the old world. That the beautiful Doric Column afficionado reaction when they see their first arch. “You call that a column!! HA.”
You think the denizens of WEB 2.0 will be happy to slog through underedited, unfinished work in the hopes that someday it will shine? My, that’s charitable of us. In return, do we get your patronage of our own underbaked crap, or are artistes like you allowed to read only the good stuff?
think of it as a galley proof with a very wide, critical and professional, if not all-knowing team.
The world.
For that to be true, you’d have to listen to people. So far, you’ve shown yourself open to suggestion–about font spacing. Mieka, font spacing is the least of your problems.
There were lots of comments way off the mark that I did not refute by the way(like the ESL comments). They were just so way off beam and said more about the commenter than me.
I’ve been following this from your first appearance in The Rejecter’s blog, and the first thing that popped into my mind was, “English isn’t his first language.” Your comments have a garbled, slightly off quality, as though you’ve studied English for a long time and mastered a few of the more advanced skills, but your basic skills and your grasp of subtleties are lacking. You also construct sentences oddly, dropping words and trying to pack too many ideas into one sentence, as though you spoke a language like German that supports denser sentences. You make strange word choices–not creative ones, off ones, as though you didn’t know the exact English word for a concept and picked something likely out of a dictionary. Your writing falls apart completely when you try to express complicated ideas. In short, your writing has the classic characteristics of an ESL speaker’s.
I suggest that you stop writing and for God’s sake, pick up a book on grammar.
(Meika. Not Mieka. Sorry. If one must insult a man, at least get his name right.)
Let me put it as honestly, as straightforwardly, as adverbly as possible:
You aren’t unique. You aren’t special. You aren’t progressive. You aren’t even particularly eloquent or grand. What you are is confusing, annoying, and suffering from severe delusions of grandeur. Continue to convince yourself all you like that you’re just misunderstood, but the rest of us will just keep on laughing, shaking our heads, and hoping to God above that you just stop writing.
Word of advice: Don’t be shitty and then leave it until the end to describe why. No one will GET there in the first place, because shitty = shit no matter how well intentioned the shit maybe.
What a hoot! Sean, I suggest you refocus the blog, and maybe change the name…101 Reasons to Stop Meika from Writing. It would, of course, not be for Meika, but for everyone around him.
Or perhaps someone will start a 101 Reasons to Keep Writing blog. Post #1 could be called You Are NOT Meika.
Between late autumn 1968 and the summer of 1969, a failed English inventor named Donald Crowhurst attempted to sail a trimaran around the world single-handed. The attempt was part of the Golden Globe race around the world sponsored by the London Sunday Times.
During the seven months of his race, Donald Crowhurst went insane. He left behind a record of his thoughts in his captain’s log.
The log books of Donald Crowhurst contain many signs of his advanced education. Crowhurst was acknowledged as a very smart and plausible man, and did design several nautical and navagational devices which, if manufactured, would have made him a comfortable living.
The early logs also reveal the indicators that would increasingly define his baffling form of insanity:
Ideodialect; the use of words in such ways that only the speaker understands them. Crowhurst’s favorite ideodialectical terms were “the system,” “the impulse,” “the game,” and “Time.”
Obsessive grandiosity; belief that his mind had been blesssed with the ability to uniquely behold a Divine cosmological truth. Crowhust’s logs toggle between correct notations of his boat’s position, speed and direction, which require rational thought processes, and grandiose passages which describe a mathematical construct of man’s relation to god and the universe. This construct, Crowhurst writes, empowers him to embrace and forgive all of mankind’s faults and grievances.
Isolation fixation; conflicting, traumatic expressions of pain and obsession with his own social, emotional, and physical isolation from others. During the race Crowhurst realizes, with surprising acuity, that his boat will kill him if he attempts to round the Horn of Africa and enter the southern ocean. He engages in an audacious set of deceptions which give the impression that he is proceeding with the race at record-setting speed. He is, in fact, hiding in the untrafficked regions of the south Atlantic and defrauding his sponsors. His detachment from reality, his manic log entries, and his eventual suicide, all begin with this act of deception, which cuts him off from his family and community in England.
Donald Crowhurst’s story is expertly described in his biography The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall.
The similarities between Crowhurt’s last log entries, and the words of this author are, to me, astonishing. I wish this soul a happier future, and recommend the Crowhurst book as a cautionary tale, if only for its strong potential to remediate the awful feelings of loneliness to which so many bright but troubled thirty-something men are susceptible, and replace those feelings with a strong desire to seek the company of other people, to seek fellowship other than with the reflections in the sterile wilderness of mirrors in which you are lost.
There is now a .before Country FAQ in response to some comments here and on other blogs.
If you guys are having trouble grasping Meika’s work it’s because you’re reading his words from left to right. As his FAQ points out, “Seeking a purely semantic explanations will leave the reader bewildered,…”
I suggest absorbing his Code Poems for guidance. Reading, after all, is a participatory activity, and like DaVinci, Meika often employs mirror-image writing, and sometimes inside-out writing as well. Ultimately, it’s up to us, the reader, to assign meaning to all those little squiggly thingies on the screen.
and check out the comments to teeth and poetry
feeling is primo
I really suggest possible readers look at Marie-Laure Ryan’s paper entitled Narrative and the Split Condition of Digital Textuality, and even though it focusses on computer games its first sections are quite enlightening and frame .before Country really well. I find on reading it, that I am an Antarctic explorer returning to the temperate zones.
many things to discuss… But anyway I’m not going to discuss such a personal topic. Reading it is ok, but discussing it makes you look like a chatter –box and a rumor-spreader.